Sovereign wealth funds will increase their assets by 60 percent over the next three years, bolstered by rising income from commodities and exports, according to UBS AG.
State funds will manage about $8.6 trillion in 2016, up from $5.3 trillion now, according to Massimiliano Castelli, head of strategy at Global Sovereign Markets, the unit of UBS Global Asset Management that services sovereign institutions worldwide. Sovereign investors will also add more assets in emerging markets and cut holdings denominated in currencies such as the euro and the Japanese yen, he said…………………………………Full Article: Source

Former Government of Singapore Investment Corporation (GIC) chief investment officer Ng Kok Song says sovereign wealth funds should look at investing in the long term. A successful sovereign wealth fund needs to have a long-term investment horizon.
An industry study expects assets of sovereign wealth funds to grow about 8 percent from US$5.2 trillion to US$5.6 trillion by the end of 2013. Sharing his vast experience in managing investments for a sovereign wealth fund, Mr Ng, who retired as GIC’s chief investment officer in February, says sovereign fund investments should be evaluated over a period of about 20 years to be meaningful…………………………………Full Article: Source

Government of Singapore Investment Corp., which manages more than $100 billion of reserves, operates without “political meddling” from the city-state’s authorities, an adviser said.
The sovereign wealth fund’s biggest investments include Citigroup Inc. (C) and UBS AG, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The investments are made for the long term, said Ng Kok Song, who retired as GIC’s group chief investment officer in January…………………………………Full Article: Source

Government of Singapore Investment Corp., which manages more than $100 billion of reserves, said it stopped publishing its nominal returns in the local currency because they should be compared with global benchmarks.
The annual report should focus on GIC’s primary mandate of achieving its so-called real rate of return, or subtracting the global inflation rate from the nominal performance, according to Josephine Teo, minister of state for finance. The fund stopped publishing the nominal rate of return converted to Singapore dollars three years ago, she said…………………………………Full Article: Source

The Government Investment Corporation’s Report on the Management of the Government’s Portfolio stopped publishing its nominal returns converted to Singapore dollars three years ago.
Replying to a question in Parliament on Wednesday, Minister of State for Finance Josephine Teo said this is to avoid confusion when comparisons are made with other fund managers or global market indices…………………………………Full Article: Source

Sovereign wealth funds (SWFs) hold a major advantage over central banks in that they don’t have to worry too much about asset liquidity – and yet some do not exploit this benefit, says Ng Kok-Song, chairman of investments at Singapore’s biggest state fund.
Being able to invest in illiquid assets and for the very long term – and hence being able to act at appropriate times in contrarian fashion – can help improve returns significantly, he notes…………………………………Full Article: Source

José Filomeno de Sousa dos Santos, the son of Angola’s President José Eduardo dos Santos, has just swept in and out of South Africa to market the country’s new $5 billion (R45bn) sovereign wealth fund, as well as to talk to fund managers and investors here.
Interviewed at the Mount Nelson Hotel, while he attended a conference of African countries that also have sovereign wealth funds, he was asked whether South Africa should follow the Angolan example. He replied that it was created to promote growth and improve socio-economic conditions in his country, but “South Africa is advanced in terms of industrialisation”…………………………………Full Article: Source

The world’s biggest sovereign wealth fund last year bulked up on a welter of WA companies, including Atlas Iron and Gryphon Minerals, as it cut back in Europe in favour of more attractive investment destinations. With more than 4 trillion kroner ($679 billion) of assets, Norway’s Government Pension Fund Global is represented in every corner of the world, including Australia where it doubled its holdings of equities and bonds last year.
The fund’s latest update shows it held 261 Australian-listed stocks worth 53.3 billion kroner at the end of December.The WA-held stocks included Ausdrill, Navitas, Seven West Media, Fleetwood, NRW and Aspen, with most of the holdings below the one per cent mark…………………………………Full Article: Source

On March 8 when Yngve Slyngstad announced the annual results of Norway’s sovereign wealth fund, he did more than unveil a routine set of numbers. The chief executive of The Norges Bank Investment Management (NBIM), which manages the Government Pension Fund Global (GPFG), was also revealing the first results following what he called a “substantial” change in the $680-billion oil fund’s investment strategy last year.
“While in 2011 the fund invested NOK 150 billion ($27 billion) of the year’s capital transfers in European equities, in 2012 the fund invested nearly an equivalent amount in emerging bond markets”, Slyngstad observed…………………………………Full Article: Source

Investments in the United States have made up a fifth of all sovereign wealth fund (SWF) capital placements since 2005, research has shown. TheCityUK, an organisation for financial businesses in the United Kingdom, found the US had been the favoured home for investment capital over the past seven years. The UK accounted for one sixth of these investors’ capital, with China, France, Switzerland, Germany, and Qatar other important destinations.
As an example, in February, the manager of the world’s largest sovereign wealth fund, the Norway Pension Fund-Global announced a $1.2 billion agreement with TIAA-CREF to create a joint US real estate venture…………………………………Full Article: Source